Unspoken
by CitronPresse
Summary: Pre-series. A night in New York. Mark experiences feelings he doesn't know how to reveal. Character: Mark. Pairing: Mark/Addison.


He watches her. Watches her breathe. Takes in her scent. Her quietness. Her warmth. At this moment, she is everything to him. He doesn't want it to end.

Addison cried herself to sleep. She didn't allow Mark to hold her or comfort her. When he touched her shoulder, she shrugged him off. When he tried to murmur soft words to her, she stopped him with a raised hand, or a turned back or a disgusted almost-word designed to push him abruptly into silence and non-communication. Silence and non-communication that he didn't desire or cause, but that he had to take the blame for.

Because this whole thing; this whole painful, screwed-up evening is based on Addison's assumptions about what he is and thinks and feels. She never once asked him what he felt. Instead, she told him. And because his heart had just about stopped with her announcement that she was pregnant with his child, he didn't have the strength to interrupt her with his inarticulate, shitting himself but over the moon anyway, joy and pleasure.

He just let her tell him he didn't want a baby, that he'd be a terrible father and that, after all, she was still married to his best friend.

After that she retreated into a kind of desperate privacy, experiencing her emotions in self-indulgent isolation because, of course, he wouldn't understand. Except he would. Only too well. Desperate privacy is kind of his M.O., underneath all the jokes and flirting and pretending he doesn't have a soul in case somebody stomps on it one too many times. So all he could do was sit with her, far away enough from her on the couch that she wouldn't flinch every time he moved or breathed or cleared his throat, and wish that she would let him in.

He tried just once. A conversation that went nowhere.

"Add . . ."

"Just don't, Mark. Okay?"

So he gave up and when she got up with a huge sigh and ignored him when he smiled at her and went to bed alone, he let her. They're the same, her and him. They're both shut away inside their own desolation. It's just that he always thought she could save him and maybe, while she was at it, he could save her back a little. She thinks he destroys her; and she doesn't seem to care much what effect she has on him.

But now he sits next to her. She's curled on her side in his bed, her back towards his side of the firm mattress, her red hair splayed on the pillow, the strands nearest her face matted with tears and stuck lightly to her soft skin. He doesn't touch her; he hardly dares move or breathe. He just watches her; drinks her in.

Then she sighs. A long, almost peaceful breath and, as she does so, he holds his breath in. There isn't room for both of them to breathe at the same time in this relationship and the best he can do for her right now is not intrude.

He has never slept well. It's not something that anyone would guess about him and not something he would admit to. Nobody would believe him anyway. A man whose only acknowledged emotions are lust and ambition has very little to be sleepless about. But there are other, more delicate feelings that circle around his heart and come out to fuck with him when nobody else is watching and it's these that keep him awake at night.

He's tried, once or twice, to share these with her. He probably didn't make a very good job of it. The first time she laughed. Not maliciously. As though she genuinely thought he was making a joke. The second time, she was lost in her own anguish again, and didn't even notice. But he clings onto the hope that one day she will. One day a crack will appear in his act and her entrenched beliefs and she'll catch a glimpse of him and it will be enough to draw her into his prison and let him into hers and free them both.

For now, though, he just watches her. He doesn't want her to wake up, because that would obliterate it for both of them. But he watches her and he loves her and, as she makes little sounds of false, dream-world bliss, his sleeplessness seems like a gift. Because this way he gets to spend time with her without the fears and defenses. He gets to spend time with her and his newly conceived child. His family. He gets to feel that he belongs. That he's done something good. And that even if he's kidding himself and she doesn't and didn't ever really want him, right now, reality has shifted to a place where he loves her and she loves him and they've made a baby together.

He allows himself one deep breath. One relaxation into the sense of having a place in the world and then he stills himself again.

He knows that this won't last. He knows that, tomorrow, when they're both awake, either he will screw this up or she will find a way to pretend he did and this certainty, this space to just be together and be content, will get blown apart.

But for now, for as long as he can, he holds still and tries to hold the moment still and tries to commit to memory the heart-swamping, quietly elated intimacy of this moment that he's not quite sharing with the woman who holds him captive.

He will never be able to tell her what he felt. But he felt it. He's feeling it. And when — or could it just be if? For a briefly apprehended second he allows himself to think not when, inevitably, but only if — it all goes wrong tomorrow, or the next day, or somewhere down the line, he will know that, even if he would have been a terrible father, he wanted their baby and he wanted her and these few hours when he drank in the possibility of that were the few hours of his life when he felt most alive.


End file.
